by Siim Land
The Kitavans of Papua New Guinea eat a very carb-rich diet with tubers, yams, fruit, coconuts, and fish. No dairy, no grains, no oils, no sugar, no alcohol, or other beverages. In contrast to the Western diet, they have virtually no cases of diabetes, obesity or stroke[570]. There are other high-carb tribes like the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Bantu in Africa who are equally as healthy. More evidence to show that you can’t blame it all on the carbs…
The Inuit in the arctic climate consume primarily caribou, seal meat, wild salmon, whale blubber, and very few berries. Their diet is high protein, high fat, and low carb but they’re not fully in ketosis because of a genetic disorder.
Other animal-based bands are the Masai in Africa, who eat primarily cattle, drink milk and cow’s blood. The Hadza also get a lot of their calories from meat during certain seasons as do the Hiwi in South America.
Figure 75 Percentage of different foods in hunter-gatherer diets
Although these hunter-gatherer diets aren’t very diverse, they still have enough variety as to cover the essential micronutrients.
The „Natural Diet“ Fallacy
However, nature doesn’t care about your longevity and well-being. It only wants you to survive long enough until you could reproduce and carry on your genes. What’s natural to eat may not always be the best for you. A few examples.
Poisonous berries, mushrooms, and leaves are growing in the forest but they’re lethal in high doses. Likewise, certain compounds in grains beans and vegetables actually cause a lot of digestive issues and inflammation when eaten in excess. There are even some plants that other animals can digest but humans can’t etc.
Some „un-natural“ foods such as MCT oil or olive oil can be healthy for you. You have to change the composition of the fruit from its original form into a processed one but these are one of the healthiest fats for you if you consume them in moderation.
Even though most modern humans evolved on a meat-based diet, it doesn’t mean that it’s most optimal for longevity. Although hunter-gatherers are devoid of nutritional diseases and degeneration, they don’t exhibit exponentially long life-spans either. Partly due to the harsh living conditions of their environment but I believe the aspect of constant mTOR stimulation and not enough deliberate autophagy may play a role in this. In the contemporary setting, high eating frequency combined with a lot of meat probably isn’t good for your health.
Eating high amounts of fruit and honey during certain seasons as hunter-gatherers do isn’t ideal for metabolic health and longevity either. They deliberately gorge themselves on sugar and carbs as to gain fat for the coming winter. However, that also induces mild-insulin resistance in the short-term. This kind of behavior on a habitual basis isn’t probably optimal for increasing life-span because of the insulin signaling. In the modern world, we don’t have such selective pressures from the environment and we have access to more food year-round. We’re not pressured into excessively gorging ourselves and storing every calorie in sight.
That’s why I think we shouldn’t romanticize the idea of eating like a hunter-gatherer because it doesn’t include the whole picture. If you’re so adamant about following the „original“ human diet, then you should also incorporate the other practices of foraging, such as scavenging for animal remains, eating nose to tail, sleeping in caves, fighting off predators, exposing yourself to the elements, getting bitten by parasites, tribal warfare, and sometimes starving for days.
Another problem with eating natural is that certain foods can actually do you more harm than good. It turns out even some „healthy“ fruits and vegetables can be quite damaging for most people.
The Plant Paradox
The problem is that plants don’t want to be eaten. They have their own evolutionary pressures and incentives that make them as self-preserving as any other species. Because plants can’t run away from predators the same way animals can, they protect themselves by producing toxic chemicals and compounds.
One of the most common plant anti-nutrients are lectins, which are sticky proteins that attach onto other food molecules and cause inflammation. This can lead to leaky gut syndrome, brain fog, autoimmune disorders, weight gain, and other inflammatory conditions. They can even contribute to atherosclerosis due to intestinal permeability and arterial damage.
Lectins can be found in seeds like sunflower, cashews, peanuts, beans, legumes, grains, such as wheat, barley, oats (gluten is a lectin), nightshades, like tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes. That’s why you want to limit your consumption of these foods because they’re pro-inflammatory. Even if you’re not gluten intolerant or have no symptoms of leaky gut, lectins will still do your body more harm than good. They’re simply not worth it because you can get more nutrients from less harmful foods.
Steven Gundry M.D. is a former heart surgeon who wrote a book The Plant Paradox where he talks about the dangers of lectins in our modern diet[571]. It’s true that after the introduction of lectins into the human food system about 10 000 years ago, people’s health has dramatically changed for the worse. Before agriculture, there weren’t a lot of the inflammatory diseases we deal with today, such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Gundry himself lost over 70 pounds, cured his arthritis, and metabolic syndrome by eliminating lectins from his diet.
However, it’s not that lectins are inherently bad – it’s just the accumulation of too much gastrointestinal stress from lectin-rich foods, other allergens, and the chronic stress everyone’s experiencing. That tomato is literally a cherry on top of the cake that sets the entire thing on fire, especially if it’s a cherry tomato...
FODMAPs are another food group that may cause digestive issues. It stands for „Fermentable Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides And Polyols,” which are short-chain carbohydrates that don’t get absorbed by the small intestine that well. Because of that, they can cause bloating, autoimmune conditions, irritable bowel syndrome, and leaky gut. FODMAP foods aren’t the cause of these issues but a low-FODMAP diet can help to improve the symptoms. FODMAP foods include wheat, rye, barley, onion, garlic, artichokes, cabbage, beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh, and some fruits like apples, apricots, avocados, cherries, plums, and chicory.
I’m not saying that you should avoid all lectins and plant phytonutrients for the rest of your life because that can create another situation of hypersensitivity to them. Hunter-gatherers would also forage a lot of wild plants and other edibles that had some medicinal benefits despite their toxicity. That’s why you do want to eat the other vegetables like cruciferous and then have the questionable ones less often. Different culinary techniques like sprouting, soaking, fermenting, and plain simple cooking can also reduce the amount of lectins in them.
People in the modern world have simply become way too soft and domesticated that they can’t handle even just a little bit of digestive strain. The perfect example is antibiotic resistance and lack of microbial diversity in the gut. Children who aren’t exposed to bacteria from dirt, animals, grains, and other sources are much more likely to develop autoimmune disorders later in life. In fact, C-section newborns are more prone to suffer from all chronic diseases. Another reason to get your hands dirty every once in a while.
The entire concept of hormesis and stress adaptation applies to both environmental conditions as well as nutrition. You want to be consuming these plants and herbs that have a mild hormetic effect so that your body could get stronger and more resilient. What makes a poison deadly is the dosage.
Mithridates and Hormesis
Mithridates VI of Pontus was the king of Pontus and Armenia Minor at about 120-63 BC. His father was poisoned and he thought that their mother ordered small amounts of poison to be added to the king’s food to slowly kill him off. The man fled into the wild where he began to self-ingest non-lethal amounts of toxins and mixing them together into potions as to make himself immune to poisoning. Unfortunately, when he was captured by Roman conquerors, he tried to kill himself with poison but failed because he ha
d built an immunity towards it. Talk about bad luck...
Mithraism is the practice of developing resistance to certain poisons by consuming them in very small non-lethal amounts. You can find examples of toxicity resistance in the ability to handle more alcohol without passing out, being able to digest lactose, gluten, FODMAPS, and not feeling tired after consuming too much food.
You don’t want to be eating lectins on a habitual basis because they do indeed cause a lot of gastrointestinal problems and inflammation. It may happen in healthy people without them even knowing it. However, introducing these compounds into your diet every once in a while as hormetic conditioning is a good idea. You don’t want to become hypersensitive to these allergens just because of avoiding every potential danger and being too strict.
The most common allergens include dairy, eggs, fish, nuts, seeds, gluten, grains, soy, mustard, celery, peanuts, shellfish, sulfites, strawberries, pollen, and the common suspects. Ideally, you don’t want to be intolerant to any of these foods and have a gut that’s capable of handling everything.
Of course, there are a lot of exceptions to the rule. You definitely shouldn’t eat raw beans or legumes because they can actually be dangerous. Likewise, there are a lot of lethal berries and plants. Someone who’s already suffering from autoimmune disorders or inflammatory disease should also not treat themselves with hormesis.
In nature, foragers are very much subjects of their environment and the food they can find there. Being a part of the technological civilization we can consume many other kinds of nutrients that were previously inaccessible due to geographical issues. That’s an amazing thing and it’ll allow us to optimize our diets a lot better.
So, the goal of an optimal diet for modern humans living at this day and age shouldn’t be to replicate the nutrition of ancient hunter-gatherers. Of course, you should eat a lot of the nutritious and nutrient dense ancestral foods but you also want to incorporate other tricks of the trade related to Metabolic Autophagy.
Essential Nutrients
An essential nutrient is something that the body cannot synthesize itself and thus it needs to be derived from diet. In humans, there are 9 amino acids, 2 fatty acids, 13 vitamins, and 15 minerals that are considered essential nutrients[572].
The minimum daily protein requirements are 0.8g/kg or 0.36g/lb of bodyweight, which for an average adult who weighs around 100-200 pounds is roughly 40-80 grams of protein. However, that’s for covering your bare nitrogen balance and I don’t think it’s optimal. For muscle growth and healthy aging, you definitely need more than that. Higher than minimal protein intake has many benefits such as increased preservation of lean body mass and weight loss. Out of the 20 amino acids, 9 cannot be synthesized by the body itself and thus need to be obtained from diet. They are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine, and histidine.
Daily dietary fat intake is suggested to be around 15%, including 2.5% as Linoleic Acid (LA) and 0.5% as Alpha-Linolenic Acid (ALA)[573]. Reference intake value for LA is said to be 10g and for ALA 2g, which on a 2000 calorie diet can be covered with about 20-30 grams of dietary fat. DHA and EPA are conditionally essential for development and growth, which practically makes them essential. Although LA and ALA can be converted into DHA, it’s not that effective of a process. It’s recommended to get a minimum of 250-500 mg-s combined EPA and DHA per day[574].
Essential vitamins are Vitamin A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, and Choline.
Essential minerals for humans are Calcium, Cobalt, Chloride, Chromium, Copper, Iodine, Iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Molybdenum, Phosphorus, Potassium, Selenium, Sodium, and Zinc.
Conditionally essential nutrients can be synthesized endogenously but they’re in most cases insufficient. They become more essential in conditions such as pregnancy, premature birth, malnourishment, childhood growth, healing, and certain diseases. That’s why you don’t really want to put kids or old people on nutrient deficient diets in hopes of making their body do extra work by converting some foods into essential nutrients.
Non-essential nutrients are not necessary for survival and they can either have a beneficial or a toxic effect.
Carbohydrates and glucose aren’t essential because the body can shift into ketosis and use ketones instead. The brain and other vital organs do need a very minuscule amount of glucose for optimal functioning even after becoming keto-adapted. However, as we’ve mentioned before, the process of gluconeogenesis can create that glucose from dietary fat and protein intake so carbs aren’t needed. Nevertheless, this may not be optimal all the time, which is why we’ll be using a more cyclical approach.
Dietary fiber isn’t essential because humans can’t digest it. The emphasis on eating a lot of fiber comes from the idea that it helps with bowel movements, feeds the gut bacteria, and lowers cholesterol. Although fiber isn’t essential, it’s still advisable to eat some vegetables, especially cruciferous and sprouts for the sulforaphane and anti-cancer benefits. Fiber’s not meant to be digested by us but by our microbiome. When the bacteria in our gut eat fiber they produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), such as butyrate, which will heal the intestinal lining. However, too much fiber and vegetables can cause digestive issues, bloating, and constipation, which is why you want to aim for a minimal effective dose. Fortunately, butyrate can be gained from animal fats as well, such as butter, tallow, and meat but to get the other pre-biotic SCFAs you’d want to eat some plants as well.
Phytochemicals and phytonutrients are non-nutritional parts of plants. They’re not essential for survival in humans but they help the plants survive harsh conditions and protect against predation. However, those same compounds can have a beneficial hormetic effect by making our own bodies more resilient. Different polyphenols, flavonoids, resveratrol, lignans, and catechins have all been shown to have great benefits on longevity and metabolic disorders. However, what makes a poison deadly is the dose. That’s why too much of anything will still be bad.
Alcohol is a non-essential non-nutrient that still has calories. It means the body can’t get any nutritional value from alcohol other than the empty calories. Now, the hormetic effect is something you may benefit from as certain spirits can fight off infections and promote ketone production even. However, the dose is probably quite small and you shouldn’t be drinking every day. You definitely don’t want to get hammered or even seriously intoxicated because you’ll do more damage than good. Instead, one shot of vodka or a glass of red wine a few times per week is probably the minimal effective dose. Different kinds of vinegar also have small amounts of acetic acid and alcohol but they’re great for blood sugar control and insulin regulation.
Recommended Daily Allowances for the Essential Vitamins and Minerals
Here’s a chart for the Recommended Daily Allowances for all the essential vitamins and minerals:
NUTRIENT
Average RDA
Upper Limit
Vitamin A
700-900 mcg
3000 mcg
Vitamin C
75-90 mg
2000 mg
Vitamin D
600-800 IU
4000 IU
Vitamin K
120 mcg
Not Established
Vitamin E
15-22 mg
1000 mg
Vitamin B1 (Thiamin)
1.2 mg
Not Established
Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin)
1.3 mg
Not Established
Vitamin B3 (Niacin)
14-16 mg
35 mg
Vitamin B5 (Pantothenic acid)
5 mg
Not Established
Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine)
1.3-1.7 mg
100 mg
Vitamin B7 (Biotin)
30 mcg
Not Established
Vitamin B9 (Folate)
400 mcg
1000 mcg
Vitamin
B12 (Cyanocobalamin)
2.4 mcg
Not Established
Calcium
1000-1200 mg
2000-2500 mg
Choline
425-550 mg
3500 mg
Chloride
1800-2300 mg
3600 mg
Chromium
35 mcg
Not Established
Copper
900 mcg
10 000 mcg
Fluoride
3-4 mg
10 mg
Iodine
150 mcg
1100 mcg
Iron
8-18 mg
45 mg
Magnesium
300-450 mg
500 mg
Manganese
1.8-2.3 mg
11 mg
Molybdenum
45 mcg
2000 mcg
Phosphorus
700-1250 mg
3000-4000 mg
Potassium
4700 mg
Not Established
Selenium
55 mcg
400 mcg
Sodium
1200-1500 mg
2300 mg
Zinc
8-11 mg
40 mg
Keep in mind that these are your average values for the average person. There are huge variations between populations, ethnic heritage, lifestyle habits, and dietary preferences.
For instance, there's some evidence showing that the need for vitamin C increases only in diets of glucose based metabolism. In fact, ascorbic acid and glucose compete for cellular transport[575]. High levels of blood glucose inhibit the uptake of vitamin C because both of them use the same membrane transport chain and because glucose is a much more prioritized nutrient.